Friday, September 26, 2008

Pitches For New History Channel Day Time Programming

History's Most Obscure Nazis

Do You Know Hans? No, Of Course You Don't.

By now, the History channel has chronicled every mundane moment in the lives of the Third Reich's major players to the point where every bookish housewife and retired grandfather know what Gobbel's preferred breakfast pastry was (unsurprisingly, it was strudel). So why not open it up a bit, shine the light on some of the party's lesser members? Sure, they may not have been that interesting, but there were so many of them, they can easily fill a twenty-two episode order. Five minutes on Josef from Hamburg, who never really bought the party line but just liked the snappy outfits. Or Fredrich, who suffered a constant inner struggle during his tour of duty due to his love of bagels. Or Cal, who was an all around good Nazi but no one ever really believed it because his name was Cal.

History's Worst Family Vacations

Should Have Gone To Cabo

We all have funny, terrible family vacation stories, but none as awful as the McCullen family, who sailed from Wales in 1678 in an attempt to find religious asylum but instead found death on the cliffs of Dover. History is full of stories like this, and there is an entire generation of bloggers and internet entrepreneurs working from home who grew up playing Oregon Trail rather than doing any work in shop class who would love to watch them. The show could highlight "I Shouldn't Be Alive" type recreations of the disasters, and could also make an attempt to grab "The Hills" demographic by substituting the usual dry diary readings with newly written, "modern" interpretations of the text: "Dear Diary, today Dads decided to weather the gale, and now we're totes out of hardtack! Worst sweet sixteen ever."